For Love 1965

James Rosenquist's screenprint, *For Love*, layers different planes and perspectives through acts of addition and subtraction. It’s interesting to imagine Rosenquist composing this image. Was it a process of building up layers, scraping back, and then adding more until he felt he had something? I wonder if he saw the tension between the hand reaching towards an object, a fish perhaps, and the abstract forms that surround them? I think Rosenquist is playing with our sense of scale and perspective, inviting us to consider how fragments can create the feeling of the real. Those flat planes of color, orange and yellow, are so evocative. The flatness of the forms is only broken by the areas of focus where there is an intense level of detail. This feels very deliberate. Like all great artists, Rosenquist is in conversation with other painters across time. He seems to be asking us: what does it mean to make an image? What does it mean to see?